Category: Annoyances

Let’s face it twitterhas changed completely from what it was supposed to be, I emphasized that because it has really changed in a lot of ways, it has gone from being a way to tell people what you were doing, to a communication tool, a spammers paradise and now desperation, yes desperation.

I am a avid twitter user and I do have a considerable amount of friends and followers on my list, but one thing that amuses me is that I see almost 2 out of 10 tweets to a link to increase followers by various numbers like 100, 200, 400, 1000, 10000 and so on.

What amuses me more is that when I click on the user profile (not link) who just tweeted about getting 10000 user as followers or any other number, they don’t even have 200 followers 90% of the time, so now we are expecting to get 10000 followers from someone who has only 200???

Another thing worth pointing out is that almost every user above 2000 followers (almost) only tweet links, they never or very rarely communicate with their friends or followers, other than maybe saying thanks for the RT (re-tweet).

So the art of desperation to get higher followers in twitter is then followed by only posting links to their followers, which is again very amusing.

I literally do not follow any new users unless I personally check their twitter profile to see what and how they tweet, for me twitter is more about communicating and sharing things, I do post links but only things I feel are interesting and would be worth sharing, and that would continue even if I reach 10000 followers.

Twitter is degrading faster than it is growing, what was once useful everytime is now useful only when something important happens, so slowly and surely people will only go to twitter when something important happens, rather than how people use it now.

These were my opinions and not of anyone else in general, I may be wrong and liked to be corrected. What are your thoughts about this? Do let me know.

If you have been affected by the last dev release of Google Chrome where there were several bugs that crashed chrome for no reason at all and are not able to upgrade to the latest version, here is a link to the offline installer for Google Chrome 3.0.187.1.

Remember this is a dev channel so don’t download it unless you have been using the dev channel for Chrome.

If you are using the dev channel for Google Chrome do not download or update the browser to v3.0.187.0, this version is very unstable and crashes the browser whenever you visit the menu item.

This update also breaks favicon’s for several sites, to limit the problems, this update has been disabled from going through the official channels, the Official Google Chrome releases site also makes a note of this issue.

This release has been stopped. The browser crashes whenever you click on a menu item. We’ll be releasing a fix later today. [mal, 11 June 2009]

So expect a new release shortly, if you have upgraded to this version you have no need to worry about installing the new version, the Google Updater automatically does that in the background, you do not have to visit the About Google Chrometo update to the latest version, visiting the option will crash the browser.

Quite recently we told you about how China had banned Twitter and Flickr, however those are not the only sites that fail to pass the censorship in place in China.

A recent comment on the Twitter and Flickr banned post from a person from Beijing suggested that China is also banning people who write about the ban, I did check the integrity of the commentator and it was definitely written from Beijing, here is a screenshot that proves it.

I did try to search across to see if this blog was banned in China and came against the Great Firewall of China which is now defunct and does not provide you with an option to check if your website is blocked in China or not.

However on further research I came across another site that will allow you to check to see whether your website/blog is banned in China, the results it provided were pretty accurate, and looks like Twitter, Flickr and YouTube are still banned in China.

Considering that China is has one of the largest Internet population, getting your blog banned would almost be like committing Internet suicide.

What tools do you use to check if your website is alive and OK in China? Feel free to tell us about them.

According to a report on Read Write Web, there is a hint that twitter might just start sharing the Geographic locations of your tweets.

This is disastrous to say the least, whatever little privacy was left may completely disappear with this move, hopefully twitter should be smart enough to allow users to control whether or not their geo-locations should be shared with others, otherwise this will cause a much bigger backlash than the issue they created with @replies.

If you are a website owner using Google Ad Services Javascript code on your site, brace yourself for some drop in traffic.

Google has been displaying a Warning: Suspected phishing site!message for websites that use the Google Ad Services code on their website. This happens only when users are using the Google Chrome browser to browse to the site.

I have been a big Feedly fan for quite sometime, for those who are not aware of Feedly, it is a really good service and Firefox add-on that enhances Google Reader, however no matter how good a application is, it definitely disappoints in one way or the other.

Feedly is as good as it is, however it has a ton of problems, which finally made me move to Google Reader itself until I found some Desktop clients for Google Reader.

Many a times people make mistake and unlike everyone we are imperfect too and made a mistake of not testing new changes we rolled out last weekend properly. The change we made was including the Lightbox plugin for WordPress which would make browsing images much more easier for our readers.

However to our surprise over the weekend we lost quite a lot of traffic and earnings, which left me wondering what was wrong or what went wrong, checked out stats and everything just to make sure that we were getting good SE traffic as well as good social networking traffic.

For quite some time I was facing a problem where Adobe Air applications particularly Tweetdeck (or any twitter client) did not open the links in my default system browser (Google Chrome) and opened the link in Firefox which was my earlier default browser.

Initially I tried to pinpoint the issue to Tweetdeck, but it seems like the issue is with Adobe Air itself.